Tag: Ovid

There is a figure in Greek mythology called Proteus, a minor sea god with two remarkable powers: shape-shifting and oracular utterance. To get the truth out of him, however, one must first catch him. When anyone attempts to grasp him, he rapidly changes from one form into another in an attempt to evade his captor’s clutches. But if a person is tenacious enough to hold on until Proteus tires and resolves into his true form, the god will render up the truth his captor seeks.
Orally transmitted stories share with this mythical sea god a “protean” character. Handed on by word of mouth, each time a story is told the teller gives it a slightly different form and a different shade of meaning, so that over time many different versions of the same story emerge. The literary author who works from an oral tradition is like the hero who captures Procrustes: first he must wrestle with the many versions of the story, but when he finally confers upon it a fixed form, he is able to make it serve him to convey a particular truth.

Taken out of context, the accounts of a great flood that nearly destroyed all living things bear a striking similarity to one another. But in this blog series, I’ve taken pains to put each story in its proper context, in order to see what meaning each writer found in it. I hope that, having looked at the meaning in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we will now be able to see more clearly what makes the Biblical story of the Great Flood stand out from the others. First, though, it might be good to recap what we have learned about the significance of the Flood as it is presented in the other two poems.

Gilgamesh grasps at immortality, but seizes on wisdom

We saw that the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh is presented by Utnapishtim as an object lesson for Gilgamesh, to dissuade him from his mad pursuit of immortality. Gilgamesh, a great king who is “two-thirds divine, and one-third man,” becomes obsessed with immortality after the death of his great friend, Enkidu. Enkidu, struck down by the gods, shares death-bed visions of what awaits him after this mortal life: a great nothingness of rotting bodies and oblivion, something the immortal gods will never suffer. In his determination to escape this dismal fate, Gilgamesh abandons his city to seek out the only man who has ever escaped death, Utnapishtim. A god bestowed immortality on him after he and his wife survived the gods’ destructive flood, but what was intended as a blessing turns out to be a kind of curse. Forced to live far from mortal men, an outcast from the restored human race, Utnapishtim lives an unnatural life of never-ending loneliness. Although he intends to story to dissuade the king from seeking a similar fate, Gilgamesh is not immediately convinced. Eventually, though, he becomes reconciled to the inescapable brevity of human life. This knowledge is the only lasting trophy that he takes with him as he returns to the great city over which he reigns. From now on, he will seek immortality only through the lasting nature of his kingly achievements.

The enduring human spirit

In contrast to the crude but powerful Gilgamesh epic, Ovid’s lengthy poem, Metamorphoses, written nearly two thousand years later, is both more finely wrought and apparently less philosophical. A careless modern reader might easily dismiss Ovid’s poem as an artful mishmash of Graeco-Roman mythology, with an emphasis on erotic love. By focusing on one small section of the rambling poem, however, we saw that there is a more serious, philosophical theme pervading the poem just below its artful surface. Ovid’s account of the Great Flood suggests both the cruelty and capriciousness of the gods — a theme amply illustrated throughout the poem — and the human virtue that allows mere mortals to endure the vicissitudes of life.

In order to emphasize this meaning of the flood story, Ovid leaves out an important detail that most earlier versions of the myth included: he does not say that Deucalion and Pyrrha owe their survival to the forewarning of Deucalion’s immortal father, Prometheus, nor that Prometheus instructed them to build a great chest and fill it with provisions to sustain them after every other source of food has been destroyed by the flood. Instead, Ovid makes it seem as if nothing more than a divine whim ends the flood before they too, last of all mortals, perish in the waters that have destroyed every other living thing.

While the poet, on the one hand, suppresses this important detail, on the other hand he emphasizes another, namely the way the elderly couple replenish the world’s human population. So that the reader does not miss the point, the poet interprets the significance of their producing offspring from stones: “[Thus} the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.” In this way, he harmonizes the meaning of the Flood story with the overall theme of the poem: life consists of constant change, but we mortals, whose life is short and at the mercy of the gods’ fickle affections, are tough enough to endure it all.

We can see that both of these poems, so different from one another, share a preoccupation with human mortality. In fact, in the understanding of the ancient world, mortality was the one characteristic that distinguished men from gods. Both poems suggest that the way to get the most out of life is to accept our human limitations and learn to rejoice in them. We are not gods, nor should we seek to be — how much better to be the best kind of humans!

Next time: A distinctive view of Man and God

In the next post, we’ll look at the Book of Genesis, which provides the immediate context for the Biblical story of of Noah and the Flood. When we do, it will be clear that the Biblical author, working from the same fund orally-transmitted myths that provided story elements for the Babylonian Gilgamesh poet and Roman Ovid, draws a radically different meaning out of them. Perhaps that meaning will help to explain why the story of Noah continues to capture the modern imagination, while the tales of Deucalion and Utnapishtim remain relics of cultures long since lost in the dust of time.

I left the discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by saying (as I often do) that, in literature, context is everything. We can’t really grasp the significance of Ovid’s version of the Great Flood unless we consider it in the context of the poem as a whole. So what is this poem really about? How does the early episode that recounts the Great Flood contribute to the overall meaning, and how does the overall meaning color the significance of the Flood account?

The constancy of change

The title hints at the poem’s meaning. Metamorphoses covers all of history (and prehistory), starting with the creation of the world and ending in Ovid’s present day. What might seem, upon a first reading, a rather aimless stitching together of innumerable ancient myths is actually a very careful selection which is tied together by a single commonality: the metamorphoses themselves, one thing being changed into another. Most of these metamorphoses show the gods turning human beings into various non-human things – dolphins, trees, stars, you name it. And why do they do this? In large part, because gods are selfish, possessive – and immortal. When a god desires permanent possession of a mortal person, he (or she) can achieve that permanence only through change – by turning the unfortunate mortal object of his desire into something that can never die. In other words, the key to permanence is change itself.

In case we have missed this point, in the final segment of the poem, King Numa, the successor of Romulus, the founder of Rome, listens to a long lecture by Pythagoras on the idea that flux (change) is the principle on which the whole cosmos is founded: things change into other things. Living things turn into dead things, the dead things decay (more change), the seasons change, everything changes. (The gods may be immortal, but they change their minds constantly.) Change is the one constant in the universe. Numa absorbs this lesson and returns to Rome, changed by the experience, a wiser man for having listened to Pythagoras. Then one king is changed for another, and so on through history, until Julius Caesar himself is murdered in the Senate and gets changed into a god (also a shooting star).

Putting kingship into perspective

This brings us to another theme emphasized in the final two books of the poem, the question of kingship (which, coincidentally, also preoccupied the writer of the Epic of Gilgamesh). Book XIV ends with the death and apotheosis of Rome’s founder, Romulus, while XV ends with the death and divinization of his eventual successor (700 years later), Julius Caesar. Julius, of course, was the adoptive father of the man who came to be known as Caesar Augustus, ruler of Rome in Ovid’s day. There was every expectation that Augustus might also claim divinity, perhaps even before his death. (I said a bit more about this in this post.)

Romulus assumed into the pantheon of the gods

But would this be a good thing, for Rome or for Augustus? Perhaps not. Becoming a god means no longer being a man – which creates a vacancy in the ruler’s seat. Both Romulus and Julius Caesar disappeared at the moment they were assumed into the pantheon of the gods, thereby creating political and social instability – the last thing Ovid’s contemporaries wanted, after thirty years of bloody civil war. The poem ends with what seems to be praise of Augustus but is actually a rather ominous warning. The poet says, in effect, “And now Augustus is ruler! The gods only know how long it will be until he, too, leaves earth to assume his place in the heavens. Let’s hope that he has a long reign before that happens.”

So the poem leaves us thinking about both the constancy of change and the ephemeral nature of kingship. In the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, you should recall, Utnapishtim warned King Gilgamesh against desiring to be made immortal like the gods. Gilgamesh had to be content with “immortalizing” himself by creating works that would long outlive him, giving him undying fame. Ovid’s warning, although less direct than Utnapishtim’s, seems more foreboding: “You want to be a god and lord it over Rome, Augustus? Just remember that the price of godhood is to surrender your manhood; the gateway into the pantheon of the immortals is death.”

The Great Flood and the metamorphosis of the human race

So this is what the poem says: the cosmos is ruled by gods who, if they take a shine to you, are likely to turn you into something you don’t want to be just so they can hang onto you. And the world is ruled by kings who like to think they are gods. The good thing about kings is that they come – and they go. Things change – if things seem bad now, they might be better in a bit (and vice versa).

This view, which pervades the poem, provides the context for Ovid’s account of the Great Flood, which shows how incredibly fickle the immortal gods can be: one minute they are basking in the worship of mortal man, the next minute they are destroying every living thing because one man behaved badly. To this extent, the Graeco-Roman gods are not very different from those in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The sole survivors of the Great Flood beget tough offspring.

But the significance of the flood story lies in what makes it distinctive, not in the ways it resembles the earlier account. The most distinctive feature of Ovid’s flood story, it seems to me, is the way in which the human race is renewed afterward. The only two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, are too old to procreate, but they despair at the thought of being the last people on Earth. So with divine help they create sons and daughters by flinging “the bones of their Mother [Earth]” over their shoulders. These are stones, which then undergo a metamorphosis from stone into flesh and bone. Lest we overlook the significance of this, Ovid points it out: “So the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.”

This toughness and durability allows mankind to endure all the inevitable chances and changes of life. The rest of the poem illustrates just how constant these changes are. If Ovid seems to end the poem with a warning to Caesar Augustus, the King-Who-Would-Be-God, his message to the rest of us mere mortals is more encouraging: “We are tough, we can endure whatever life throws at us. Be strong, endure. In the eternal flux of the cosmos, this is what makes us who we are.”

Coming up: the Biblical account of the Great Flood

Now that we have taken a good look at the stories of the Great Flood in pagan literature, I hope we will be able to see the Biblical account in Genesis with fresh eyes, so that we can discern the significant ways in which the Bible story differs from these others.

Yesterday, by a piece of serendipity, I discovered that there’s a revised edition of Charles Rowan Beye’s Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil, which now contains a chapter on Gilgamesh. I want it! I read the earlier edition years ago when I was in graduate school at the University of Dallas, and it made an indelible impression on me, as well as my teaching. The key idea I took away from it was an understanding of what it means to be “literary.” I mention this now because it has a bearing on my reading of the flood accounts I’ve been discussing, particularly the ones in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Metamorphoses.

What does it mean to be “literary”?

As the original edition of Beye’s book points out, Homer’s epics are regarded as marking the beginning of the Western literary tradition because they were the first great stories in fixed, written form to survive and influence later poets. Scholars agree that Homer was drawing on a long oral tradition of myths and legend. Because they had no literary predecessors, neither of Homer’s great epics is “literary” in the sense of making allusion to a previous written tradition. Or at least, that’s what I would have said before I read the Epic of Gilgamesh. Now it seems pretty clear to me that Homer must have been familiar with some version of that earlier, Mesopotamian epic. And Greek scholar Charles Rowan Beye seems to agree. In commenting on the second edition of his book on ancient epic, he says:

The important addition in this 2006 book is the chapter on the Gilgamesh poems. I spent a considerable time gathering the results of the latest research in order to present a full account of these Sumerian-Akkadian texts. There is no doubt in my mind although it cannot be proven other than by inference, that they had real influence on the Iliad and Odyssey texts. This connection means that students and teachers of so-called western literature have to enlarge the canon certainly to include these narratives. Literature can no longer be said to begin with Homer. [Emphasis added.]

However, we can never know to what extent Homer expected his readers to be familiar with Gilgamesh, or to recognize the way in which he (apparently) appropriated some of its themes and tropes for his own poems, so perhaps Homer’s epics really are not “literary” in the narrow, specialized sense in which I am using that term. I believe it’s likely that Homer would have expected his readers to be familiar, not with Gilgamesh, but with the many Greek heroes who appear in his poems — their character, their milieux, their deeds — as depicted in myriad stories passed down from (even more) ancient times in the oral tradition.
There is a reason I make a sharp distinction between the oral and the literary traditions. This is because stories passed down orally change with each retelling, thus there were many (often conflicting) versions of many Greek myths. And because of this fluidity, there was no canonical, set, “correct” version of any of them. By writing down his own stories of Achilles during the Trojan War, and of Odysseus in the years following the conclusion of that war, Homer set the stories in a fixed form. Because his versions were so beautifully crafted and deeply meaningful, they are the versions that people wanted to hear and read, time and again. The oral versions faded and died, but Homer’s epics lived on. Later poets studied and imitated the masterful examples that Homer presented. Thus was born a “literary” tradition, that grew out of a previous, oral tradition.

Tradition’s bad rap

The term tradition, however, is another which is often misunderstood. “Tradition” simply refers to whatever gets handed on from one generation to another, whether that be stories, beliefs, customs, or something else. The iconoclastic modern world, from Francis Bacon on, has often treated “tradition” as an idol that must be smashed — and it must be admitted that there is a danger in worshiping the past unreflexively. However, this handing-on that we call tradition is an essential element of culture — no tradition, no culture.

Without getting into a whole critique of modern culture, let’s just acknowledge that in most cultures, throughout history and throughout the world, anything or anyone that achieves great age is revered as possessing wisdom and value. Such cultures are called “traditional.” (This is not particularly true of our modern culture, which glorifies youth and novelty.) Thus Homer’s epics, because they were so greatly prized, got handed down through the centuries and eventually their great age lent them a patina of authority. The Greeks came to view Homer almost as the ancient Jews regarded Moses, educating their children out of his epics, as if The Iliad and The Odyssey were great encyclopedias of Greek history and culture — almost as if they were sacred texts filled with divine truth and wisdom, like the Bible.

In fact, one of the reasons the people of Athens condemned and executed Socrates was that he apparently held that Homer’s stories about how the gods behaved were unworthy of belief. Socrates was interested in Truth with a capital T, but to him Homer’s epics were simply imaginative renderings of human truth (with a lower case t), and therefore unworthy of dogmatic belief. Later, in his great philosophical dialogue on the nature of justice, which we call The Republic, Socrates’ great pupil, Plato, had his (fictionalized version of) Socrates declare that poets such as Homer should not be allowed into the perfectly just city, because their stories of the gods would warp the impressionable souls of the young, making them unfit to govern the city. Such an idea was deeply shocking to traditional Athenians, which is one reason why they convicted Socrates of atheism and put him to death — to reject Homer’s depictions of the gods was tantamount to not believing in the gods at all.

Literature can be another way of learning the truth

The first edition of this book changed my understanding of epic.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, however, this does not mean that Plato was against all made-up stories, just those that misrepresent Truth. Later still, Plato’s own disciple, Aristotle, wrote in his Poetics that that poetry (i.e., fiction) can be philosophical, meaning that it can help us contemplate immutable truths. In this way, I suppose, Aristotle goes a long way toward rescuing Homer from Socrates’ condemnation of him and other “lying poets.” As many modern readers can attest, the stories of Achilles and Odysseus certainly capture some enduring truths about human nature, which is why we still read them with such enjoyment and appreciation — although I’d wager few people (if any) would feel moved to piety by Homer’s depictions of the gods.

At any rate, as Beye points out in his book, by the time of the reign of Caesar Augustus — when Virgil wrote his Aeneid (and Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses) — there had accumulated a long, literary tradition of heroic epic. This means that there was a huge fund of received practice, including not only characters and stories, but also poetic technique and tropes, upon which poets drew to compose their own poems. They expected their readers to be well-read enough to recognize the clever, artful, and meaningful ways in which they made use of these traditional elements. And we too should recognize these deliberate literary allusions, if we wish to understand properly the works of such poets.

Oh, how I wish my high school English teachers had understood this! I remember one class when, after we had studied some excerpts from The Odyssey (a bad practice in itself — always read the whole work, not excerpts taken out of context!), someone asked the teacher why we weren’t going to study Virgil’s Aeneid. The teacher replied that there was no point, since the Aeneid was just a slavish (and inferior) imitation of Homer’s epics. It makes me grind my teeth now to remember this, because this pronouncement colored my views on ancient epic, and on Virgil, for decades thereafter.

Tradition does not stunt creativity

The reason my teacher’s dismissal of Virgil grates on me so is that I now understand (thanks in part to Charles Rowan Beye’s book) that Virgil’s constant allusion to, and imitation of, both The Iliad and The Odyssey was not “slavish” at all, but a creative, deliberate, and sophisticated manipulation of his highly literate audience’s imaginations, in order to bring out the meaning of his story that he wanted them to perceive. His epic about Aeneas was a Roman story, written for a Roman audience, containing a distinctly Roman meaning. It was intended, in part, to address very present concerns of his contemporary audience. But these were things the poet did not wish to discuss directly, discursively, openly. Instead, he explored them indirectly, poetically, allusively, creating an analogy not only between Trojan Aeneas and the Greek heroes Achilles and Odysseus, but also between ancient Aeneas, the legendary “father of Rome,” and Caesar Augustus, the recent savior of the country whose own adoptive father, the dictator Julius Caesar, had been declared pater patriae, “father of the nation.”

Focus on Caesar Augustus

Ovid, and others, may have feared Augustus as a god-king.

All of Rome waited with bated breath to see what kind of “father” Augustus himself would prove to be. He held enormous power, and Romans were deeply distrustful of allowing any one man supreme power over the nation. Augustus was careful not to allow himself to be styled a king (that, after all, was one of the things that got Julius assassinated), but he was, in fact, essentially a monarch, over the most expansive and powerful realm the world had ever seen. And, of course, too much power can make a man go a bit mad (as later inheritors of the title Caesar made plain). So there were many who wished (but hardly dared) to admonish and advise the great Augustus, as well as to warn and reassure the Roman people. Some of them, poets, found that the safest, and perhaps the most effective, way was to convey these ideas indirectly — that is, poetically.

This is, to a great extent, what Virgil was doing in The Aeneid. I believe it is also, to a somewhat lesser extent, what Ovid was doing in the Metamorphoses. Both relied heavily on their readers’ familiarity with the long Graeco-Roman mythopoetic literary tradition to do so. In a coming post, I’ll try to explain a bit of how I believe Ovid made use of the literary tradition in his Metamorphoses in order to convey meaning to his contemporary audience, and how this can help us today, at least those of us who are well-read enough to be able to recognize the early works to which Ovid alludes. I wish Charles Beye had written a chapter on the Metamorphoses, but he admits that this would have been beyond the scope of his expertise:

What the book truly lacked, however, is a chapter on Ovid’s Metamorphoses since it is abundantly clear that Ovid is probably self-consciously playing Apollonius [author of the Argonautica] to Virgil’s Homer. It would have been a great chapter but, since I am a Hellenist, and even working up the Aeneid taxed my faculties for appreciating Latin poetry, I had to let well enough alone.

So perhaps, at least, I shall have to go back and re-read his chapter on the Argonautica, as a way of understanding better what Ovid was up to in the Metamorphoses. Ah, well, there are worse fates.

I will leave you with this very modern take on some quite ancient material — a Japanese anime rendering of the exploits of Alexander the Great. It just goes to show that traditional material continues to inspire modern storytellers.

This Japanese anime is a mish-mash of science fiction and fantasy, purportedly about
the exploits of Alexander the Great — although perhaps in an alternate universe!

Reading, like so much of life, is all about seeing what is to be seen — not only what is visible in a cursory glance, but also patterns that lie beneath the surface to give meaning to the words, not to mention all sorts of little hints and clues “hidden in plain sight,” which provide an extra level of enjoyment and meaning to the attentive reader. So now that we’ve looked at Ovid’s general poetic purpose in writing Metamorphoses, it’s time to take a close look at the episode in which he describes a great flood that destroyed all living things in the ancient world, to see if we can discern the details that can tell us the meaning of this episode within the poem as a whole.

I frequently walk along the shore of the lake shore near my home. I enjoy both the panorama of the vast lake and its farther shore, as well as the fine details of the wildflowers that surround me as I stroll. With the passing of the year, the view is constantly changing, so there is always something new to notice. Usually I carry a camera with me, to take pictures of anything that looks new, unusual, or just interesting. Often, when I upload my photos to my computer and look at them on the monitor, I am startled to see that my camera has captured things that I never noticed with my naked eye, thanks to the 24X zoom lens.

When I looked at Utnapishtim’s account of the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, I began with a panoramic view of the poem and then “zoomed in” to see how Utnapishtim’s story fitted into the larger story of Gilgamesh. Ovid’s Metamorphoses requires a different technique, I believe. The poem is what Aristotle would call an episodic story, a string of discrete events with no real temporal or causal connection. There is neither a clear plot nor an identifiable protagonist. The story of the great flood that destroys (almost) all mankind is merely one tale of transformation amongst many others. Therefore, I propose first to zoom in to look at the flood episode, and then slowly to widen the focus to see what meaningful connections can be found between this episode and the rest of the poem.

The flood account appears in the first of fifteen books (i.e., chapters or sections) in the poem. Book I starts with the creation of the world and its creatures by an unnamed god, and ends with the introduction of Phaethon, a young demigod. The story of the Great Flood occupies the middle of the book, ll. 177-437, describing an event that occurred back near the dawn of time. There is no no surviving witness like Utnapishtim to tell the tale or interpret it for us, so we will have to pay close attention to how the poet invests that event with meaning.

Jupiter’s wrath and destruction, a new race of Man

The story begins with Jupiter’s anger. Jupiter (Zeus) calls the other Olympian gods together in council to tell them that he is worried that humans should not have been allowed to rule the earth. He is especially outraged that one man, Lycaon, behaved barbarously toward him when Jupiter visited him in human guise. Although he has already punished Lycaon by turning him into a wild wolf, Jupiter says that the entire human race must be destroyed. The other gods are equally outraged at Lycaon’s behavior, but many of them doubt the wisdom of destroying the entire race of Man, since this would leave the gods without worshipers, and would allow wild beasts (such as the one Lycaon has become) to roam the world freely. Jupiter placates them by assuring them that all will be put right.

Jupiter’s first idea is to rain down his trademark thunderbolts, but then he recalls that the world is destined to end in fire — he doesn’t want to bring about the end of the world, just to cleanse it of man’s stain. So he decides that water will be a safer means of destruction, and therefore orders the various gods of wind and water to create a great deluge that will drown all humankind.

Rain pours down from heaven, but the seas and rivers also rise up and overflow the earth. Soon it is as if there were no earth, just a boundless ocean. Ovid provides a pitiful description of the ravages of the flood. Men and beasts alike desperately, but fruitlessly, try to escape the rising waters. Houses, ships, crops are destroyed by the relentless deluge. Not only Man but all his works are destroyed, and the world is cast into confusion. Even the most powerful of beasts are helpless, and those people who manage to cling to trees and mountains above the floods die a slow death of starvation. When Jupiter sees that only two mortals survive — and these are decent, pious folk — he orders the waters to recede.

Thus aged Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, in a small boat, find themselves lodged in the heights of Mount Parnassus. (Technically, these two are demi-gods, half-divine offspring of immortal Titans.) But when they realize that they alone of all humankind have survived — and that apparently by chance — Deucalion becomes despondent. They are old and all alone in the world and, unlike their immortal sires who could fashion creatures from the clay of the earth, they have no means of producing offspring.

As they wander the mountaintop on which fate has cast them, the two chance across the abandoned shrine of a local deity, Themis. They promptly prostrate themselves, crying out to the goddess to help the devastated world by telling them how they can produce progeny to restore humankind. She responds with an oracular utterance which, like all oracles, is disturbingly ambiguous: they must leave the sacred precinct with heads veiled and robes ungirt, casting behind them as they go the bones of their great mother. This gives them pause — it would be sacrilege to disturb their mother’s grave, even if they could find it. That being so, they reason, it must not be what the oracle meant, for no god would ever instruct them to commit sacrilege. Deucalion guesses that by “your great mother” Themis must have meant Mother Earth. Her bones, then, would be stones.

With this as their working theory, they decide it won’t hurt to try. So they leave the temple, loosen their clothes, cover their heads, and toss some stones behind them as they go. The stones that Deucalion tosses — mirabile dictu! — turn into men, and those of Pyrrha are transformed into women. Ovid describes in detail how the miraculous transformation occurs, the stones gradually changing shape and then softening into human flesh, and he even ends the description with a little moral: the new race, thus created, is tough and durable like the stones from which they are formed.Once the new race of man has been generated, the Earth herself spontaneously generates other kinds of creatures. The description of these other new living things, however, is not so magical.

Earth spontaneously created other diverse forms of animal life. After the remaining moisture had warmed in the sun’s fire, the wet mud of the marshlands swelled with heat, and the fertile seeds of things, nourished by life-giving soil as if in a mother’s womb, grew, and in time acquired a nature. So, when the seven-mouthed Nile retreats from the drowned fields and returns to its former bed, and the fresh mud boils in the sun, farmers find many creatures as they turn the lumps of earth. Amongst them they see some just spawned, on the edge of life, some with incomplete bodies and number of limbs, and often in the same matter one part is alive and the other is raw earth. In fact when heat and moisture are mixed they conceive, and from these two things the whole of life originates. And though fire and water fight each other, heat and moisture create everything, and this discordant union is suitable for growth. So when the earth muddied from the recent flood glowed again heated by the deep heaven-sent light of the sun she produced innumerable species, partly remaking previous forms, partly creating new monsters. (I:416-37, A. S. Kline translation)

This description is based on the natural philosophy of Ovid’s day, and is therefore intended as a “scientific” explanation of how the earth was repopulated with all sorts of living creatures — including monsters such as Python, an snake so enormous that it covered a mountaintop, so poisonous that Apollo himself has to kill it with his arrows. Thus the flood account gives way to the next episode of transformation.

Details worth noticing

Did you notice the tiny grasshopper? Neither did I, until I zoomed in.

As we begin to think about what Ovid is trying say with this tale, we can start by noticing how this story of the Great Flood differs from the more ancient one in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The first significant difference is that Ovid, unlike the Gilgamesh poet, provides a motive for the destruction of mankind. The Gilgamesh poem doesn’t attempt to conjecture what brought on divine wrath, saying simply, “The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict the Flood.” In the Metamorphoses, on the other hand, a single god, the greatest of them all, Jupiter, is moved to destroy humankind, and he easily persuades the other gods to help in this endeavor, despite the misgivings of some of the others.

Utnapishtim said that some of the gods, after the fact, saw the problems stemming from the destruction of the human race, but only was because humans were, for the Mesopotamian gods, a kind of slave race that catered to their needs. In Ovid’s account the Olympians do not “need” mortal man, although they do enjoy the fragrant sacrifices that humans offer them. Yet some of the gods upset by Jupiter’s plan of destruction recognize that the world needs humankind even if the gods do not. Why? To govern the earth. Even Jupiter himself seems to acknowledges the beneficial role played by mankind, for he reassures his fellow deities with a promise that the destroyed race will be replaced.

The need for the human race

If we have read the poem from its beginning, we will understand why mankind was deemed, in some way, “necessary.” The early lines of the poem describe how, in the beginning, some unnamed god created the ordered Cosmos not ex nihilo (as Christians believe) but by creating order out of chaos (chaos, in this sense, is unformed primal matter). Chaos, before the divine touch, was not really “something,” it simply had the potential to become something.This chaotic, unformed matter was a seething mass, in which various potentialities strove against one another. The creative act of the god was to give that chaotic matter form, allowing it to fulfill its potential, and order, ending strife. Thus the creator transforms primal matter into light and dark, earth and sky, seas and dry land. The winds are separated and sent to their corners, and the stars twinkle in the heavens as the gods take their places. Then the Earth is filled with creatures of the sky and sea and land. Finally, the creator takes the clay of the earth and fashions the first man:

But one more perfect and more sanctified,
a being capable of lofty thought,
intelligent to rule, was wanting still
man was created! Did the Unknown God
designing then a better world make man
of seed divine? or did Prometheus
take the new soil of earth (that still contained
some godly element of Heaven’s Life)
and use it to create the race of man;
first mingling it with water of new streams;
so that his new creation, upright man,
was made in image of commanding Gods?
On earth the brute creation bends its gaze,
but man was given a lofty countenance
and was commanded to behold the skies;
and with an upright face may view the stars:
and so it was that shapeless clay put on
the form of man till then unknown to earth. (I:76-88, Brooks More, trans.)

So man was made “in image of commanding Gods”; this is why men stand upright with “lofty countenance” to “behold the skies” and “view the stars,” while four-legged “brute creation bends its gaze” toward the earth, in search not of transcendent truths but merely its next meal. In other words, men were given rational powers so that they might govern the Earth just as gods govern the Cosmos.

This is a distinctly Roman idea, one not found in Greek mythology. The Roman historian Sallust, for instance, in the preface to his history of the Catiline War, alludes to the connection between man’s upright stance and his rational powers, while Cicero in De Re Publica — specifically, in the surviving portion known as the Dream of Scipio— amplifies the idea that man’s god-given task is to govern the earth.

So it was to fulfill this noble purpose that man was first created. But the first race of man was fashioned from clay, and ultimately proved unworthy of the task of governing the world, since many men, like Lycaon, were hardly able to govern themselves. We might imagine, then, that this is why Man 2.0 is made from stone rather than clay. This is not, however, the explanation that Ovid gives; instead, he says, “[S]o are we hardy to endure / and prove by toil and deeds from what we sprung.” (I:414-15).

A fate larger than god

For the moment, let’s put aside the question of why the poet imposes this interpretation. We’ll come back to it in a later post. Right now I’d like to look at one other striking way in which this account differs from that provided by the Gilgamesh poet. Utnapishtim survived the flood because he had been forewarned by the god Ea, who instructed him in the means of survival. Deucalion and Pyrrha, however, get no such divine help. This is especially remarkable when we consider that each of the elderly survivors could boast of a divine parent, but either Prometheus (father of Deucalion) nor Epimetheus (sire of Pyrrha) helps them to survive, nor does any other god. The couple seems to have survived by chance, ill-prepared as anyone, alone in their little boat without provision.

But, one might object, Jupiter saved them, didn’t he? When he first announced his plan of destruction, he declared:

“Beneath my sway are demi-gods and fauns,
nymphs, rustic deities, sylvans of the hills,
satyrs;—all these, unworthy Heaven’s abodes,
we should at least permit to dwell on earth
which we to them bequeathed.” (I:192-5)

He seems to be acting in accord with these words when he recalls the flood as soon as he notices that only Deucalion and Pyrrha remain, demigods both. Jupiter also reassured the other deities when he “promised them a person different from the first, of a marvelous creation” — and this is exactly what happens. Does this not prove that Deucalion and Pyrrha survive with Jupiter’s help, and for his purpose?

Jupiter, being high as well as mighty, can see a larger fate. But it makes him unmoved by mortal suffering.

Well, no, not exactly. Foreknowledge is not causation — Jupiter knew what would happen, but he did not cause it to happen. Although the greatest of the gods, whom none of the others dares cross, he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. More powerful than any other deity, he is not all-powerful — after all, he needs the cooperation of the other gods to create the worldwide deluge. And though he can foresee the outcome, his knowledge is not the same as control — he is aware of fate, but he does not cause it. Recall that Jupiter’s first idea was to destroy humankind with thunderbolts — but then he remembered that the world was fated to end in fire, and he feared being the one who would bring it about. Similarly, it would appear that he predicted the miraculous creation of a new kind of mortal not because he intended to make it happen but simply because he foresaw that it would happen. Jupiter is instrumental in allowing Deucalion and Pyrrha to survive the flood, but that is not to say that their preservation is part of any plan of his. Neither does he himself create the new human race — no more than he created the first one.So who does turn those rocks into men and women — Themis? Again, I think not. Themis merely tells them what to do, but does not necessarily make it happen. Perhaps it is the unnamed demiurge, the anonymous god who first ordered the world out of chaos. We can’t know for sure, neither does the poet claim to know. It happens like magic, no explanation needed nor offered. A mystery, pure and simple. The world needed humans, so humans there were.Notice, though, that while other species were spontaneously generated from the earth, the miraculous reinvention of mankind requires the cooperation of the two flood survivors. This is another significant way in which this story diverges from Utnapishtim’s tale. Utnapishtim and his wife were given immortality and then banished to the ends of the earth, while elderly Deucalion and Pyrrha remain mortal and are instrumental in the creation of a new mankind.

Meaningless without context

Ovid’s account of the Great Flood, taken on its own, seems to make even less sense than the story told by Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim had a clear message he intended to convey with his story — “don’t grasp at immortality, because it will not provide happiness.” He learned this the hard way, and wanted to spare Gilgamesh his own troubles. Ovid’s version is not so easy to interpret. Should we just accept it as merely one of many instances of transformation? If that were the case, then we would have to accept that the poem as a whole — which is, after all, one long string of transformation stories — is itself equally meaningless. Meaningless? Ovid would roll over in his grave if he thought we were going to dismiss his artful poem so cavalierly!

It looks, then, as if we are going to have to get some idea of the poem as a whole, and then figure out how the Flood story fits into that larger schema. That’s a pretty big task, which we’ll tackle in the next installment of our Adventures in Comparative Mythology. So let me reiterate the advice I offered last time: read at least all of Book I and all of Book XV, with a liberal sampling of the stories in between. You can find at least two good translations online, this poetic one and this one in prose. Read well and prosper!

Without context, we can’t tell where we are, or what we’re looking at.

Recently, we took a close look at the account of the Great Flood that appears in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and found that, although it superficially resembles a similar account found in the Bible, its meaning was shaped by its context in the story. Context is always crucial for understanding anything — if you see a circle drawn on a page, without seeing it in relation to something else, you can’t tell if it’s mean to represent a ping pong ball, the Earth, or a freckle. The same is true when we are reading — you can’t understand what a story is intended to mean if you don’t know something about who is telling it, to whom he’s telling it, and in what circumstances or for what purpose. So as we now consider the Great Flood account in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, once again context will be crucial if we want to see what Ovid was getting at.

Before we look at the context of the Flood account within the larger poem, then, we need to consider the rhetorical context, that is, who wrote it, when, and for whom, as well as the kind of thing it is.

A poem without peer

Let’s start with the last first: what kind of writing is The Metamorphoses? It’s a long poem that knits together many stories from Graeco-Roman mythology, and sets them in order, roughly, from the creation of the world up to the poet’s present day. All of the myths woven into this larger whole were selected because they are stories of literal transformation (metamorphosis) — people being changed into things, and (less frequently) things into people, at the whim of some god or other.

If the Metamorphoses has a hero, it must be Love itself.

Scholars, who like to classify literary works into specific genres, disagree about whether this poem can be called an epic, because it seems to lack an identifiable hero. Some say that Eros (Roman Cupid) is the hero, although heroes, strictly speaking, are never gods. Heroes are always mortals, probably because gods cannot change and change (transformation) is essential to any good story. At any rate, the god Eros/Cupid himself does not actually appear in most of these stories, although erotic passion (in the sense that I discussed that term here in an earlier post) is a theme that connects the stories.

The fact is, The Metamorphoses is sui generis, i.e., in a category all its own, which I believe is exactly what the poet wanted. It is unlike any other poem before or since. By the time this poem was written, epic was already a well-tested genre (it was written nearly two thousand years after the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance). Composing an epic was usually the capstone of a poet’s career, attempted only when his skills had acquired their highest polish. Vergil’s great epic of Roman beginnings, The Aeneid, completed about ten years before The Metamorphoses, was the first (only) great Roman exemplar of the form, and Ovid no doubt felt it unwise to compete directly with such a masterpiece. At any rate, we should note that by this time epic is definitely a literary genre with a long pedigree. By “literary,” I mean not only that is was written (not passed on orally, as more ancient poems had been), but that it makes deliberate, albeit often oblique, reference to earlier written poems. The poet could expect his readers to be familiar with these earlier stories and recognize the references.

Written for an educated and sophisticated audience

So let us consider who his intended audience was. These would primarily have been educated people above the middle social rank in Rome, sophisticates and would-be sophisticates alike, including those who had enjoyed and admired Ovid’s earlier works. Of his various poetic works, the two that are best-known today are his Amores (“The Loves,” poems chronicling a love affair) and Ars Amatoria(“The Art of Love,” or how to seduce and keep a woman), as well as his Remedia Amoris(“The Cure for Love,” how to get over a past love affair). These earlier poems develop some of the ideas embedded in The Metamorphoses, for instance, that love is fickle and, while it can be sweet, it can also be a kind of affliction. By making love a pervasive theme in The Metamorphoses, the poet is able to make oblique reference to his own past poetic triumphs, as well as to other literary predecessors.

By a poet who wants to make a name for himself

A provincial lad made good, Ovidimmortalized himself through his poetry,yet died in ignominious exile.

That brings us to the question of who the author was. He is known to modern readers as Ovid, but his full name was Publius Ovidius Naso. He was a Roman citizen, although not a native of the city itself but from the provincial town of Sulmo. He went to Rome for his education and stayed to make a name for himself, much as young writers and artists today gravitate to New York or Los Angeles. To put that career in historical perspective, we should note that the year before Ovid was born in 43 B.C. Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was assassinated in the Senate by his friends and associates because they suspected that he was going to let himself be declared King of Rome. This event precipitated a long, bloody civil war which culminated in Julius’s adopted heir, Octavian, becoming Rome’s first Emperor. Octavian, under the name Caesar Augustus, was still reigning when Ovid finished the Metamorphoses around A.D. 8, the year Augustus exiled Ovid to the far ends of the empire (Pontus, on the Black Sea), and banned his books from Rome. Ovid, like Icarus, had been a high flier, but he suffered a mighty fall: Pontus was regarded — probably rightly so — as the arse-end of the mighty Roman empire, a most ignominious place to wind up. Ovid died there in A.D. 17 or 18, just a year or so before Augustus himself.

As a response to perilous times

Thus the poet’s entire life was bracketed by the rule of the man we know today as Caesar Augustus, a fact that I believe is highly significant if we are to understand The Metamorphoses and Ovid’s version of the Great Flood story. Ovid — like his contemporaries Livy, the famous historian of Rome, and Vergil, the poet who composed the Aeneid, an epic glorifying the great Trojan progenitor of Rome — wrote, to one degree or another, in response to the civic upheavals through which they lived. In Ovid’s case, his response was largely to turn away from bombastic nationalism and devote his poetic talents to the apparently more trivial topic of love.

Why love? First, perhaps, because love is notoriously fickle, always changing, so it fits with the theme of transformation. For another reason, because lighter fare goes down more easily in troubled times. Also, love was a subject in which Ovid was already well-versed. But finally, I believe, because this “apparently trivial” topic provides an attractive screen for a more serious underlying purpose, one that the poet did not wish to address more nakedly. I will have more to say anon about what I believe that graver purpose was.

The Fall of Icarus, attr. Pieter Brueghel the ElderAs with the Metamorphoses which inspired it, there is more going on herethan is immediately apparent.

At any rate, despite the obvious differences, I think Ovid’s purpose was similar to that of Livy in his Ab urbe condita, his history of Rome, and Vergil in the Aeneid: to reassure his readers, living through shocking and demoralizing times, of certain enduring truths while also reminding them of the lessons of the past lest they be repeated in the present. The truth that seems to drive The Metamorphoses is not, as Vergil’s epic affirms, that Rome has an undying, god-given destiny to rule world, nor, as Livy’s history shows, that good governance requires both prudence and adaptability, but rather that “the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself.” Hence Ovid’s subject, transformation (metamorphosis), the whole history of the world presented as a series of one thing changing into another.

Next time: Ovid’s story of the Great Flood

There is plenty more that could be said about the rhetorical and literary context of this poem, but that’s enough to be getting on with. In the next installment, I’ll look more closely at the poem as a whole and the way the Flood story fits into it.

If you have not read The Metamorphoses, there are some good English translations online, such as this one at the Perseus Project Online or this one by A. S. Kline. For our purposes, I recommend reading at least all of Book I and all of Book XV, with some liberal sampling of what goes on in between (it doesn’t much matter which middle bits, since there is not much “plot” to tie them together). Until next time, read well and prosper!

Retired from college teaching, I'm now a freelance editor and writer living in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. When I'm not working for other writers, I'm busy writing books, novels, and short stories, or blogging about literature and the moral imagination on my blog, A Catholic Reader.